Wednesday 18 November 2009

The airport

So I woke up this morning and read another article about some politician complaining about Modern warfare 2's Airport level and decided that I should check it out myself. I jumped onto youtube and wasn't surprised to find over 30 videos have already been added of the level all of which we're basically the same, none of the players had even thought to keep thier fingers off the trigger button instead they blasted away at all those innocent digital people.

So I thought I would add the video here as its a powerful peice of imagery that brought up a myriad of emotions in myself from surprise to disgust.

So check it out but please be aware this isnt mario things are pretty real.

Articles I have found

So had a bit of a google and found some articles I may be able to use towards my reseach, I wont bore anybody with the whole articles but heres the links so you can check them out yourself if you feel that way inclined.

http://www.bowenresearch.com/studies.php?id=3
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4038606/
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.25.06/emotional-0604.html
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2008/04/top-ten-videoga.html

starting to research

So I thought I better start to document things for the research module of my degree.

well here goes......

1st and formost for everybody the question i am setting for my research is
"how do games influence emotion" which probally sounds pretty simple to everybody but take a second to think about it and see if you can explain how super mario bros on the NES made you smile, laugh and get angry when all it was made of was 8 colours and some simplistic sounds.

Now take that a step further how did call of duty modern warfare 2's ominous airport scene make you feel when you 1st saw it? I was pretty shocked by it maybe even close to disgusted but that wasn't due to the imagery the graphics was portraying it was the fear I could hear coming from the innocent russian civilians being gunned down.

But then while playing Grand theft auto I can happilly drive on the sidewalks mowing down 100's of innocent civilians proforming drive-by shootings which kill even more people but this doesn't make me stop and think "Oh my god why did the developers put this in the game".

I put this down to the detail portrayed in the games, in GTA its cartoon violence with funny sound effects that makes the player laugh and disreguard the lives of the innocent as collaterol damage, MW2 however has realistic animation of people cowering in fear thier eyes tell the player that they want to live and the screams and gunshots are just as real as if you was proforming the act in the real world.

Well thats the gist of what I'm looking into so lets get to the research.